Fear of 'Mistakes' Keeps Party Leadership Off the Campaign Trail

With elections just a month away, Likud members are expressing major concerns with the campaign designed by US strategist Arthur Finkelstein, saying it is lackluster and devoid of content.

Or rather, it will be lackluster, as technically speaking Likud won’t even start campaigning properly until next Tuesday. But what they’ve seen suggests a very subdued campaign more concerned with avoiding mistakes than attracting voters.

“Many ministers are being walled off from the campaign,” insisted one senior official, adding that there are no campaign talking points and while opposition parties make the rounds on Israeli media outlets, virtually no one from Likud or Yisrael Beiteinu is on.

Other parties are trying to find issues to attack the ruling coalition on. Not so much on the Palestinian issue, which they see voters as ambivalent about, but pushing things like the nurses strike and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s resignation.

Polls have showed Likud-Beiteinu’s joint list losing a little ground on both the left and the right, polling 35-38 seats. Having fallen out with both the center-left and the religious right, that’s going to make forming a government difficult, and has many Likud leaders convinced that they need to run a more aggressive campaign, or at least any campaign at all, to try to pick up seats instead of simply trying to tread water until January.